Day Thirty: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
Tobe Hooper’s film opens with a bit of narration (courtesy John Larroquette) and then fades into a series of news reports explaining a bizarre series of grave robbings. We then fade into an image of a corpse real close, and pull out to reveal that the corpse has been perversely dug up and rearranged on top of a tombstone. We then cut to the title: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
No further than three minutes into his picture, Hooper has set the mood, and established a tone that he will masterfully maintain for another seventy nine minutes. I haven’t read the script, but I would imagine that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre would read like a slightly above average example of the kind of movies that have been popular ever since: A group goes where they shouldn’t, receives a little off the track vengeance, the end. Hooper’s film though is one of the masterpieces of the genre, and that’s because it’s an unusually precise, evocative exercise in pure terror.
The characters continually talk about the unforgiving heat, and Hooper makes you feel it. You can feel the sweat beading up on the character’s skin, the filth under their collar. You feel the clutter, rot and chaos in the deranged Sawyer family’s house, you feel the weeds blowing in the scant wind the environment will allow. Like many films that would follow, Hooper takes his time setting up the carnage the title promises, but it doesn’t feel like he’s padding a slim running time. The deliberateness of the film sets us up for a fall, leaves us vulnerable, with the title we obviously know we’re in a horror picture, but we don’t know when we’re going to get a horror picture.
Ten minutes in, the lead characters, a group of early twenty somethings, pick up a hitchhiker on the side of the road. Hooper plays with us here, we feel that we’re meeting one of the villians of the picture, but we can’t be sure, it may just be one more stop on the seemingly unending tour of backwoods weirdness. The dialogue is natural and unforced, the dread mounts with an unsettling lack of calculation. Then, before we’ve caught up, we realize that we’re in one of the scariest scenes of the movie, and a scene that will come back to haunt the characters in surprising ways.
This Texas town feels like no other weird little town in the horror genre. We don’t sense an art director high fiving a cinematographer immediately outside of the camera’s periphery. We wonder why the hell these dumb kids want to see their grandparent’s old house so bad. When an older gentlemen says “You may want to be careful, some folks don’t like you poking around, and aren’t afraid to let you know about it”, you laugh at the delirious understatement. This is a chaotic, apparently lawless town that’s inspired, not by hundred other movies, but by an authentic fear of the tearing of social fabric. Some people just don’t fucking like you, and they’re not afraid to show it.
Let’s go back to word authentic. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is so damn good because it feels real, uncalculated, unscripted, untested against a hundred age groups to see if it’s the next Saw, it just feels like it’s always existed somewhere waiting to be found. Thank God it was found before the idiotically overused catch phrase “torture porn” was coined.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was probably a happy accident, Tobe Hooper certainly hasn’t made a film ever again of it’s caliber, but that doesn’t matter. Hooper probably set out to make a little shocker that would get his foot in the door, and he accidentally made true art that remains relevant and unshakably disturbing, regardless of how many times it’s ripped off or remade. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a cathartic, relentless, black comic realization of the most familiar of nightmares: the one where you are chased by people you don’t know for no reason, and you can’t ever seem to get away.
★★★★
Leave a Reply